Chapter 1

"Aunt Ines, you sit. I've got it."

Perry said it with both hands already on the cake stand, which is a thing you can only say after you've decided.

Three tiers. Lemon and elderflower, because Nadine asked for lemon and elderflower in March and then changed her mind twice and then changed it back.

I had been up since four.

I sat.

I have a bad habit of narrating my own funeral, so I'll say it plainly: I sat down at my niece's wedding and watched my sister-in-law carry my cake across a room, and I thought, well, at least somebody finally offered.

Whit set it on the table and said, "All right, everybody, let's cut the cake."

He has said that sentence for forty-one years.

My husband held the ballroom door while his sister passed. Her shoulder cleared the frame by an inch. Mine had not cleared a doorway with a cake that size since I was fifty-seven, but nobody had asked my shoulder.

Sixty guests turned toward her. A few lifted their phones, and she tightened both hands around the silver rings beneath the stand.

I knew those rings by touch. The left one pinched when the weight settled, and I had a pale groove across my middle finger from carrying the stand out of my kitchen.

My daughter slid into the empty chair beside me. She tucked my napkin across my lap and gave my wrist a gentle pat.

"I'm glad she helped. You look tired."

That was the second kindness of the afternoon. The first had been my husband taking the box from me beside the car, after I had carried it from the counter to the back door.

In January, his sister had taken over the Sunday cake. In April, she had brought the cake for my husband's birthday. Last month, she had arrived at my daughter's house with two dozen cupcakes before I finished cooling mine.

Four things in one year. I could count. Flour rewards that skill.

Across the room, his sister lowered the stand. One heel caught on the linen, and my hand left my lap before I stopped it. She steadied the bottom tier herself.

Applause moved through the tables. She stood straighter when a guest leaned near the cake, closed her eyes, and breathed in the lemon.

My husband looked back at me. He smiled and rubbed his own lower back, as if we had both been spared something difficult.

"Better, right?"

I folded the napkin once, then again. My thumb had left a crescent of buttercream on one corner.

"For whom?"

His smile held for half a second. Then the photographer called the couple forward, and the room rose around us.

His sister reached for the knife. My fingers closed around its wooden handle first.

She kept one hand on the stand. I kept mine on the knife, and between us sat three tiers I had leveled, filled, chilled, stacked, and carried through the last hot morning before the wedding.

Then my husband placed a plate beside my hand, easy and cheerful, certain he was giving me back the nicest part.

"Come on," he said. "Cut the cake."